“What do you mean, you ‘want to talk to that cop’?” Jessica shot back. “And in an alley in the middle of the night? What kind of a crazy idea is that?”
Then she noticed the gym bag full of guns that Travis had left on the floor of the cramped space that passed for the living room of their tiny, pay-by-week apartment. There were three or four handguns in the bag, and one that looked like an Uzi.
It was far more weaponry than they could possibly need. Travis didn't realize that he was nothing more than a smalltime con who had happened upon a moderately profitable idea. (And that idea was just about played out and burned out, given that the bald cop and the lady cop had found their way to her mother’s house in Iron Mills.)
Travis, however, apparently had some fantasy image of himself as a flamboyant, larger-than-life outlaw. It was part of his personal code of masculinity: He couldn't let Don the cop and the bald cop—whom he saw as lesser men—force him to run. And he probably couldn't even conceive the idea of running from the lady cop.
She now grasped the full import of what Travis was planning: It all added up, suddenly.
“Travis, I’ve told you before: You can’t kill a cop.”
“That cop made a fool of us, baby. Or at least he tried to. But we’re going to do something about that.”
Who is ‘we’? she thought. Leave me out of that. Stop talking about we.
Like she had told him before: It was one thing to kill a nobody like Robert Billings. It was another thing to kill a cop. The death of one cop brought down all of them in force, and they would be relentless.
“Travis, you can’t kill a cop,” she repeated. “You can’t even lay your hand on a cop. You can’t threaten a cop.”
“People kill cops everyday. Don’t you read the news?”
“Yes, and usually when people kill cops, they are tracked down.”
Travis nudged the gym bag with his foot. “They ain’t trackin’ nobody down. I’m ready.”
With that he turned away from her, so as to put a peremptory end on this conversation, which was simultaneously absurd and deathly serious.
Travis disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. Thirty seconds later she heard the shower running.
Travis was losing his mind, she decided.
She didn't care about “Don” the cop. Don knew what team he was playing on, the risks. If he died, there would be a big public funeral—with speeches from important people, and maybe even other cops playing bagpipes. She had seen that on television once. (Or was that something they only did in big cities like New York? She didn't know.)
In any event, though, Don would get a better send-off than Robert Billings, or Harold Markey, or Scott Green—the three men they had killed under the guise of ‘Lilith’.
More to the point, she and Travis would get no send-off. When they died in a shootout with the cops (which was a distinct likelihood given the plan that Travis had mapped out) no one would mourn them—probably not even their relatives.
Well, there wasn't going to be any ‘Jessica and Travis’ anymore. At least not until she had dissuaded Travis from his foolhardy intentions.
Listening to Travis fumble around beneath the hot water, she bent silently down and picked a pistol from the gym bag.
She lifted the gun and examined it. She already knew that it was loaded. Travis had said many times that guns should always be kept loaded. Otherwise, they were perfectly useless in the event that you actually needed one. Jessica was no expert on firearms, but she also knew that the gun in her hand was a semiautomatic pistol. The logo on the barrel of the pistol consisted of an intertwined S and W inside a closed circle. Smith and Wesson.
Could she really use a gun against Travis? Oh, she figured she would never actually shoot Travis. He was far too beautiful to kill, and she knew that she wouldn't have the nerve.
But she could use the gun to shock some sense into him, in a worst-case scenario. And they were definitely headed for the worst-case scenario. Serious times called for serious measures, right?
Before she did that, she would try to find Alicia at the Loft and warn her from luring the cop outside. Even Travis would balk at shooting a cop inside a crowded nightclub.
She hoped.
Jessica slipped the pistol underneath the cushion of the nearby sofa. If Travis wouldn't listen to reason, perhaps he would listen to the gun.
42.
The atmosphere inside the Loft was what Dave had expected, more or less: a sea of mostly young patrons gyrated to piped-in music that was grungy and unnecessarily loud. The identification of the particular musical genre completely baffled Dave. He had not been much of a popular music enthusiast even in his teens and twenties. It might have been techno rock or new wave heavy metal, for all he knew.
The building’s distant past life as a warehouse was readily apparent in the Loft’s high ceilings and exposed ceiling timbers. From the four corners of the main dance room, rotating strobe lights raked the crowd.
“So what do you think?” Alicia—aka Lilith—asked Dave. Dave was making a valiant but doomed attempt to dance amid the crowd. Alicia, however, was something of a natural. Her body moved easily to the grinding, electronic rhythms. Her dilated pupils and generally spacey facial expression suggested that she was moderately high on something.
“It’s great,” Dave said. He shouted at her, because there was no other way that Alicia could have possibly heard him, given the surrounding noise. Dave was wearing a wire tonight, just like he had during his date with Lisa Cullen at Pompilios. He wondered if Alan was able to hear any of his conversation with Alicia. Almost certainly not.
“Dancing is nice,” Dave said. A conscious effort was required for him to avoid cringing at his own insincerity. “But what do you say we take a little rest?”
Alicia shrugged. “Okay by me. Say—what time is it?”
Dave glanced at his watch. It was a little past 10:30 p.m. Rather than attempting to recite the time, he held up his watch so she could see it.
“Why?” he asked, half hoping that she would press him to take her home—or back to their rendezvous point at Fountain Square. He had spent more than two hours with Alicia, and so far she had revealed absolutely nothing that suggested any association with or knowledge of the online entity known as Lilith. Alicia might be the lover of a convicted felon, but she seemed
innocent of any crime except probable drug possession.
He was spinning his wheels. This was shaping up to be a boring and fruitless night.
Alicia paused, as if thinking, before responding to Dave’s question with a shrug. In less than half an hour, Dave would find himself wishing that he had seen the significance in her hesitation. Instead he wrote it off as the typically delayed reaction of a druggie.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s have a seat over there.” Alicia gestured toward a cluster of tables at one side of the room. A few of them were vacant.
They were barely seated when a waitress appeared. In keeping with the gritty thematic elements of the Loft, the waitress was clad in blue jeans that had been deliberately ripped in the factory. Her hair was three different colors, and Dave could not even have begun to count her piercings.
“What’ll you have?” the waitress asked, appraising both of them.
Dave gestured for Alicia to order, but Alicia gestured the young woman away, somewhat brusquely.
“I don’t wanna drink,” she said. “I wanna go outside.”
“Outside?” Dave asked. He looked up from his seat at the waitress. “Perhaps later,” he said. She nodded wordlessly and moved on to the next table. Then, back to Alicia: “You said that you want to go outside?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s kind of packed in here, don’t you think?”
“That seems to be the whole point of it.” He thought about reminding Alicia that the Loft had been her specific, emphatic choice for the evening. Then he thought better of it, reminding himself that he was supposed to be a man on a first date. A
man on a first date would go out of his way to be accommodating, wouldn't he?
“I’d kinda like to have a smoke,” she added. “Do you smoke? I’ve got a fresh pack of Marlboros.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.” Dave saw no breach of protocol in making this admission. There was nothing about the character of “Don” that would require him to suck on a cancer stick.
“Well, to tell you the truth, maybe I’d like to make out a little, too,” Alicia said. She leaned forward across the tiny table and gave him a lascivious smile. Dave felt her toe nudge the shin of his pants leg.
Dave returned the offer with a neutral smile that he knew to be ineffectual. Although he had found himself oddly, inadvertently drawn to Lisa Cullen, he felt absolutely no attraction to this woman seated across from him.
First of all, he knew all about her criminal associations. Add to that the fact that she had been visibly buzzed from the beginning of the evening. Dave glanced briefly at one of her forearms, which now rested on the tabletop, and noticed for the first time the raised needle tracks in her veins.
Nevertheless, a man on a first date wouldn't reject such an offer, would he? What could he say? That he didn't kiss on a first date?
“Oh—all right,” Dave replied at length. “Sure.”
Alicia gave Dave a tentative smile, as if she had been wondering if he would, in the end, agree. But what man, he asked himself again, would turn down an offer of illicit kissing on a first date—even if it meant going outside late on a Saturday night in a bad part of town?
“Come on, then,” she said, standing up. “I know just the place.”
Dave followed as Alicia led. He hoped that Alan had been able to hear and decipher the conversation, and that he would follow.
Alan, however, had heard almost none of their conversation. There was simply too much noise inside the Loft.
He was parked in the Explorer, a block down from the dance club. The Explorer didn't stand out too much, even in this part of town. It was a Saturday night, after all; and the gentrification drive had brought a lot of expensive vehicles into this section of the inner city.
However, the Explorer did stand out as a vehicle that was unlikely to be the property of one of the area’s lower income residents. This made Alan a potential target. He was well armed, and confident that he could handle whatever came his way. But he did not necessarily project such an image.
Certainly the group of three street toughs who walked by on the adjacent sidewalk did not believe so. Alan noticed them out of his peripheral vision. They did a double take on the Explorer, and exchanged looks when they saw the lone middle-aged white man inside the car. They murmured briefly among themselves, then stopped and looked into the vehicle.
One of them tapped on the front passenger side window.
Alan could not simply ignore them, for they were unlikely to go away unacknowledged. Using the automatic power window button on the driver’s side, Alan rolled the opposite window down. At the same time, he removed his wallet badge from his pants pocket. His Glock was resting on the center console between the seats. The young men might or might not notice the Glock, depending on how observant they were.
Alan flipped open the wallet badge. He got a good look at them now. All three were adults, probably past their teenage years, but not far into their twenties.
“I hope you gentlemen have a good reason for tapping on that window,” he said. “I might not look the part, but I’m here on official police business.”
When shown a badge, citizens could usually be placed into one of two groups, depending on their reactions. The first group was immediately impressed by the credentials of law enforcement. The second group saw the displayed badge as a challenge.
The three young men on the sidewalk immediately distinguished themselves as belonging to the latter group.
“You think I give a shit, mother-fucker?” one of them said. “I got me a badge, too.”
He nudged his comrades. Laughter ensued.
The largest of the three, and apparently the most hostile, jostled his way forward and rested his hands on the door of the Explorer. Alan could see his face clearly now. There were no signs of intoxication, but this young man might be spoiling for a fight.
The situation, which would have been dismissible had the young men dispersed at the sight of the badge, now verged on being dangerous. The Explorer’s doors were locked, but Alan was vulnerable with three of them this close, and the passenger window down.
“What say we just rip your old cracka ass outa there right now, mother fucker? And maybe take this here car o’ yours for a spin. Huh? Whatta you got to say about dat? Oh, you might as well just put dat badge away. ‘Cause like my homey here tol’ you, we got badges, too.”
“Yeah? Well do you have one of these?” Alan lifted his Glock from the center console. He did not aim it directly at the young man. But he made perfectly clear, through his tone and expression, that the gun could be aimed in the young man’s direction, at a mere second’s notice.
The three young men were temporarily taken aback by the sight of the weapon. In this part of town, though, they might very well be armed themselves, and perceive an advantage in their superior number.
Without taking his eyes off the young men, Alan opened the driver’s side door with his left hand and slid out of the vehicle. Before the young men could react, he was standing in front of them on the sidewalk, though at a distance that would not make an escalation inevitable.
Had this encounter taken place earlier in the evening, a crowd of spectators likely would have gathered by now, either discouraging the young men or egging them on. Now, however, it was that intermediately late hour, when most people were already inside a club or bar of their choice, but still several hours away from closing time. Alan noted that despite his proximity to the Loft, the immediate vicinity was deserted—except for him and his three new friends.
“Look, guys,” Alan said, holding the Glock. “The show is over, okay? It’s time for the three of you to move along now.”
They waited, assessing the changed situation as it was now presented to them. A few minutes ago, they had been sure that they had the advantage. Now they weren’t so sure.
Under different circumstances, Alan would have detained the three young men, and called for backup from the Cincinnati Police Department. That wasn't an option now. Tonight he had other priorities. Moreover, all communications with Dave had effectively been severed.
Then Alan heard footsteps on the nearby pavement. He averted his attention ever so slightly, so that the three young men would hopefully not detect his distraction.
A Caucasian woman with shoulder-length dark hair jaywalked across the street on which the Explorer was parked, barely checking the traffic as she hurried past. She was wearing jeans and a windbreaker. There was a bulge in a part of the jacket where neither the male nor the female anatomy should protrude. It took Alan less than a second to recognize the shape as the stock of a handgun.
The woman briefly glanced at Alan. She obviously was in a hurry, but would nevertheless have sensed the altercation between the four men. Then Alan made another—far more important recognition.
He had stared at Jessica Knox’s likeness many times—in the photo image of her taken for her Ohio driver’s license, and in the several photos of her that had been in Cynthia Knox’s living room. There were only so many coincidences that Alan could accept. The woman walking past him now wasn't a woman who looked like Jessica Knox; she was Jessica Knox.
And Jessica Knox appeared to have recognized him, too. Had she somehow seen him that night in the parking lot of the Terrace View restaurant? Had Cynthia Knox given her a detailed description of the tall, balding cop who had come around looking for her? For Jessica Knox, no less than for himself, there would only be so many coincidences that could be accepted.
Jessica Knox turned suddenly away and quickened her pace. Alan could have followed her, if not for the three young men who still st
ood before him.
Although his distraction had been momentary, it had not gone unnoticed. One of the young men made a move for Alan’s gun, based on the assessment that Alan, being a police officer, would not answer violence with immediate violence of his own. And surely he would not fire his weapon at an unarmed citizen, the young man apparently believed.
Alan did not fire. He made a quick step backward, surprising his attacker. Nor had the young man expected someone twenty-five years his senior to possess such sharp reflexes. The young man looked Alan in the eye, wondering what was to happen next. He appeared ready to make another lunge for the gun. After all, he had done so once and he was not dead yet.
Alan swung the barrel of the Glock, clipping the young man in the temple. He stumbled to one side, went down to his knee, and then fell onto the sidewalk, where he assumed a fetal position.
His two companions immediately stepped backward.
“Oh, man! Po-lice brutality!” the large one said. He had been brave only a few minutes ago, ready to rip Alan from the seat of the Explorer.
“It wasn't police brutality,” Alan retorted. “He’s damn lucky I didn't shoot him. Now, if there is a single brain between the three of you, you’ll help him up and get him out of here. You’ve already done enough to justify arresting you and charging you with assaulting a police officer, but it turns out that this is your lucky night.”
The two men who were still standing gave Alan a nasty scowl, and the tall one muttered a few curses under his breath. But they did as Alan had suggested, more or less. They leaned down to assist their felled comrade to his feet. Their comrade had pressed an open palm against the side of his head. He was cursing and yelling with much emotion, threatening lawsuits against Alan.
Alan couldn't afford to waste any more time with these three. He used the key fob to lock the Explorer. There was a better than fifty-fifty chance, he knew, that the hoodlums would do some damage to the Explorer before they departed, but that would have to be billed back to the taxpayers of Ohio. Turning away from them, he hurried after Jessica Knox. Now at least one of the three young men was shouting at his back, telling him that he had better go away and keep moving, lest they come after him and kick his ass.
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